It
took about ten years for people to get the idea that there was something
wrong with the Gettier Problem. By the early 1970s, a number of analyses
had been offered to accommodate Gettier’s (1963) counterexamples to the
traditional ‘JTB’ view: Michael Clark’s (1963) simple no-false-lemmas proposal,
various ‘indefeasibility’ analyses beginning with Lehrer
(1965) and Lehrer and Paxson (1969), and Goldman’s (1967) original
causal theory, among others. Those analyses had run into further counterexamples;
revision after revision had been offered, only to meet further and more
elaborate counterexamples. Not only was there no end in sight; there was
not even a sense of beginning to converge.

In
itself, that was hardly an unusual situation in philosophy. We might expect
the optimism of the most enthusiastic practitioners to have been attended
by merely the normal degree of professional pessimism. But, no: the Gettier
Problem was not doing so well as that; it had begun to get some bad press.

IThe Gettier Problem problem

Some
epistemologists wrote pointedly larger and more general works, being careful
to play down the Gettier Problem and address it only unemphatically, in
subordinate clauses (even though they did not want us to miss the solutions
they offered).[1]
Informally, the Gettier Problem became a leading focus, if not the focus,
of disenchantment with the definition-and-counterexample method of analytic
philosophy. In some cases the disenchantment spilled over into scorn; there
were slighting references to ‘the ‘S knows that p’
crowd’. That attitude combined expansively with the complaint commonly
made, that among analytic philosophers the adversarial method had gotten
out of hand and that people had begun flinging elaborate counterexamples
only to be clever and to score points, with no thought for the larger picture
or for positive understanding. (Another popular sneer of the period was,
‘Why don’t you go publish a little note in Analysis?’) Above all,
it was suggested that the Gettier project was unfruitful, idle, pointless,
almost antiphilosophical.[2]

One
feature of the postGettier analyses thought to show their fecklessness
was their ungainly, sometimes meandering complexity. For example:

S
knows that
h iff (i) h is true, (ii) S is justified
[by some evidence e] in believing h…, (iii) S believes
that h on the basis of his justification and…(ivg)…there is an evidence-restricted
alternative Fs* to S’s epistemic framework Fs such that (i) ‘S
is justified in believing that h’ is epistemically derivable from
the other members of the evidence component of Fs* and (ii) there is some
subset of members of the evidence component of Fs* such that (a) the members
of this subset are also members of the evidence component of Fs and (b)
‘S is justified in believing that h’
is epistemically derivable from the members of this subset. [Where Fs*
is an ‘evidence-restricted alternative’ to Fs iff (i) For every true proposition
q
such that ‘S is justified in believing not-q’ is a member
of the evidence component of Fs, ‘S is justified in believing
q’
is a member of the evidence component of Fs*, (ii) for some subset C of
members of Fs such that C is maximally consistent epistemically with the
members generated in (i), every member of C is a member of Fs*, and (iii)
no other propositions are members of Fs* except those that are implied
epistemically by the members generated in (i) and (ii).][3]

Faced
with such a monster, we may be unable to think of a further counterexample,
but that inability is as well or better explained by the very convoluteness
of the analysis than by its correctness.

Yet
no similar opprobrium attached to other, ostensibly similar chisholming
projects -- for example, the Gricean analysis of speaker-meaning, the analysis
of social convention inaugurated by David Lewis, the Kripkean causal-historical
theory of linguistic referring, the search for criteria of personal identity
through time, or the counterfactual theory of causality. Why not? Perhaps
the difference was an historical accident of timing or of personality.
Or perhaps it was just that those enterprises have never led to the breathtaking
complexities that ‘S knows that P’ did.[4]
It is well to remind ourselves that no effort of analytic philosophy to
provide strictly necessary and sufficient conditions for a philosophically
interesting concept has ever succeeded. And there should be a lesson in
that. Yet the Gettier project still seems to have outstripped all others
in the extent of its failure; why did the other analytic projects never
reach the extremes of futile complexity that the Gettier industry did?
More deeply, is there something wrong with the Gettier project? Does it
rest on some false presupposition?

What I shall call the ‘Gettier Problem problem’
is that of explaining what is distinctively wrong with the Gettier project.
There have been a number of attempts over the years. My purpose in this
paper is to survey and evaluate those.

IIUninteresting solutions

Originally
the Gettier Problem was cast as the search for the ‘fourth condition’ of
knowing, a condition to be added to ‘J’, ‘T’, and ‘B’, to block Gettier’s
counterexamples to the sufficiency of ‘JTB’. The search took place during
the sunset years of ‘conceptual analysis’, the activity of taking a philosophically
interesting notion and trying to find a set of conceptually necessary and
sufficient conditions for the notion’s being exemplified. Outrageous and
fantastical counterexample scenarios were allowed, of course, because a
mere conceptual possibility would be enough to refute a claim of conceptual
necessity or sufficiency.

That
feature alone would have made some philosophers scorn the Gettier project,
because of healthy Quinean skepticism about ‘conceptual truth’ and analyticity.[5]
If the very idea of a conceptual truth is infirm, then to seek conceptual
truths about knowing is obviously misguided. (And Gettier practitioners
did typically style themselves as investigating ‘the concept of’ knowing,
even into the 1970s.) But even if one is a Quinean skeptic, there are three
reasons why that is no satisfactory solution to the Gettier Problem problem.
First, the Quinean complaint applies across the board; it does not reveal
anything wrong with the Gettier project that is not wrong with any other
‘strictly conceptual’ quest such as that of trying to analyze causality
or linguistic referring, or for that matter trying to define ‘doctor’ or
‘bachelor’ or ‘doe’. Second, one cannot complain, as against (e.g.) the
personal identity literature, that the hypothetical cases are all fantastical
or wildly science-fictional and ordinary concepts just do not bear that
close scrutiny. The counterexamples that figure in the Gettier literature,
though usually unlikely, are just as usually not fairy-tale or science-fictional
or otherwise merely conceptual, but nomologically possible. Some
are actual.[6]
Third, by the same token, it is entirely possible by any standard to have
JTB without knowing; people actually do that. So for all that any Quinean
has shown, it is not only reasonable but very interesting to ask what must
be added to mere JTB in order to constitute a case of knowing. Analyticity
is not required.

I
pause in this section to review a few other uninteresting solutions to
the Gettier Problem problem, though in slightly ascending order of interestingness.

Denying
‘J’.
Early on, it was occasionally suggested that Gettier’s examples were not
counterexamples, because they did not in fact satisfy ‘J’; what they showed
is rather that no sheer amount of conventional evidence suffices
for complete justification. Though the luckless S’s evidence was
strong enough ordinarily to count as knowledge-affording, it was not evidence
of the right sort or structure, and so was not fully justifying (Pailthorp
1969).

This
is uninteresting because it is verbal. What the examples showed is that
no amount or strength of evidence short of entailing evidence would do,
unless that justification were also not defective in Gettier’s characteristic
way; it does have to have the right structure in addition to its strength.
There are two distinct factors, strength and structure. Even if we choose
to withhold the verdict ‘J’ until the second factor has been established,
that does not tell us how to establish it.

The
TB analysis.
Sartwell (1991; 1992) notoriously argued that knowledge is merely true
belief, i.e., that every true belief counts as a piece of knowledge.[7]
If Sartwell is right, then Gettier’s cases cannot be counterexamples, because
there can be no counterexamples to ‘JTB’. Not even ordinary ‘J’ is required
for knowing.

This
is uninteresting (as a solution to the Problem problem) because Sartwell’s
position is so radical that if one actually accepts it, the rest of one’s
theory of knowledge will have little if anything to do with traditional
epistemology. Also and in particular, one will lose the distinction aforementioned,
between two ways in which justification can be found wanting (insufficient
strength, and Gettier defect); for in what respect is a Gettier victim’s
justification found wanting, if not in that it fails to constitute
knowledge?[8]

Skepticism.
The Gettier Problem presupposes that ordinary ‘J’ is fallible, in that
a person can have an epistemically justified but false belief. (Recall
that according to the usage of the time, ‘epistemic’ justification is justification
that would normally be strong enough to afford knowledge, so long as the
subject is not gettiered in some way.) This means that (indeed) ordinary
‘J’ is enough for knowledge when the subject is not gettiered or the like.
But any skeptic will tell us that that presupposition is false. Epistemic
justification requires the truth of the justified belief; otherwise the
conceded evil-demon possibilities and other skeptical scenarios would preclude
knowledge. If there is no empirical knowledge at all, we should hardly
be surprised that Gettier victims lack it.

This
is less uninteresting than the TB diagnosis, because skepticism is believed
by some epistemologists and taken very seriously (to say the least) by
many more. But it is still comparatively uninteresting. Of course
the Gettier Problem arises in the first instance only for those of us who
are not skeptics.

Also,
as in the case of TB, we lose the distinction between failing to know because
our justification is not strong enough and failing to know because we have
been gettiered. The Problem does arise for a skeptic in the second instance:
Any skeptic should admit that knowing is at least a regulative ideal, and
that some cognitive conditions come far closer than others to satisfying
it. A subject who has what anyone would consider overwhelmingly strong
evidence should be counted as just-about-knowing, or as-good-as-knowing,
or knowing-for-all-practical-purposes (compare ‘flat,’ for those who hold
that nothing is absolutely flat[9])
even if the skeptic is right and no one ever strictly knows. But this holds
only so long as the subject is not gettiered. A Gettier victim does not
just-about-know or as-good-as know; a Gettier victim simply does not
know.[10]
That difference remains to be explained, even for a skeptic.

Nomic
reliability.
Dretske (1971) and Armstrong (1973) argue that one knows only if, in the
circumstances, one could not have the reason one has for one’s belief
(Dretske) or be holding the belief itself (Armstrong) unless the belief
were true. This is not to say that one’s evidence must be entailing. Rather,
it is about the natural relation one bears to the relevant chunk of one’s
environment: The relation between one’s having that reason or holding the
belief is nomic. One cannot be mistaken; by law of nature, the only way
in which one could now have that reason or hold the belief is for the belief
to be true. If that nomic requirement is satisfied, one cannot be gettiered,
because in any Gettier case there is an element of luck or fluke in S’s
being right. This explanation is like the skeptic’s in that it preëmpts
Gettier by denying the knower a kind of fallibility that Gettier requires,
but it does not entail skepticism, and neither Dretske nor Armstrong is
a skeptic.

This
is by far the least uninteresting of the comparatively uninteresting solutions,
because it was independently motivated and also because it (demonstrably)
opened up a positive research program. Reliabilism dominated the field
for years, both as a theory of knowing and as a theory of justification
more generally. But as a solution to the Gettier Problem problem, it is
still comparatively uninteresting, for two related reasons. First, though
it does not entail skepticism, it militates for great stinginess in knowledge
ascription; no one would suppose that the nomic requirement is met in any
but the most felicitous of circumstances (Lycan 1984).How
often does it happen that even if my eyes and brain are working normally
and atmospheric conditions are good, it would be nomically impossible
for me to be in my current perceptual-cum-cognitive state and still be
fooled? -- much less the other homey sorts of things we take ourselves
to know, such as our own names, what we ate an hour or two ago, who chairs
our department, etc. If nomic Reliabilism is true, we know hardly anything.

Second,
it is now generally conceded by Reliabilists themselves that the Dretske-Armstrong
nomic formulation was too strong in more specific ways (e.g., Pappas and
Swain 1973). Subsequent versions have variously weakened that formulation
(e.g., Goldman 1976). The weakenings burden their respective authors with
the need to block Getter cases, and so the Gettier Problem returns for
them.

IIIInterlude: a simple analysis

Before
I proceed to the more interesting and viable suggestions that have been
offered as solutions to the Gettier Problem problem, I should confess that
I have my own favorite solution to the original Problem. (All right, I
am announcing that I have one, and with at least a bit of pride.)
For a reason that will emerge, I can guarantee that my analysis will convince
almost no one; and on inductive grounds I can predict with complete confidence
that someone will find a clear counterexample. But here it is.

Start
with Clark’s
no-false-lemmas proposal, which was immediately suggested by Gettier’s
own two cases: S’s belief must not rest upon any false grounds;
in particular, S’s reasoning must not pass through any false step.
This was of course instantly counterexampled. (Space does not allow detailed
description of all the cases; I shall assume some familiarity with them.)

Against
the sufficiency of ‘no-false-lemmas’:

Noninferential
Nogot
(Lehrer 1965; 1970). Mr. Nogot in S’s office has given S
evidence that he, Nogot, owns a Ford. By a single probabilistic inference,
S
moves directly (without passing through ‘Nogot owns a Ford’) to the conclusion
that someone in S’s office owns a Ford. (As in any such example,
Mr. Nogot does not own a Ford, but S’s belief happens to be true
because Mr. Havit owns one.)

Cautious
Nogot
(Lehrer 1974; sometimes called ‘Clever Reasoner’). This is like the previous
example, except that here S, not caring at all who it might be that
owns the Ford[11]
and also being cautious in matters doxastic, deliberately refrains from
forming the belief that Nogot owns it.

Testimony
Nogot
(Saunders and Champawat 1964). S’s evidence is all hearsay, but
very reliable hearsay. S is told overwhelming evidence that Nogot
owns a Ford. S’s grounds are all true: S was (indeed) told
all those things, and by a highly reliable informant.

Existential
Nogot
(Feldman 1974). S does not acquire the evidence itself, but only
the existential generalization of it: ‘There is someone in the office of
whom it’s true that….’ S has no idea who that person, the protagonist
of the evidence, is. But from that existential generalization, S
justifiably infers the generalization ‘Someone in the office owns a Ford.’

Stopped
Clock
(Scheffler 1965, following Russell 1948). S looks at a clock and
forms a true belief as to the time of day. S has every reason to
believe that the clock is working well, but in fact it has stopped.

Sheep
in the Field
(Chisholm 1966). Looking
into a field, S
sees an animal only a few yards off that looks, sounds, smells, etc., exactly
like a sheep, and S noninferentially forms the perceptual belief
that there is a sheep in the field. Actually the animal is of a different
species but has been artfully disguised. Yet there is a real sheep in the
field -- ‘way off in a remote corner of the field, completely hidden behind
thick hedges.

Sure-Fire
Match
(Skyrms 1967). S strikes a dry Sure-Fire match and is epistemically
justified in thinking it will light. Actually the match has an incredibly
rare impurity and could not possibly be lit by friction, but it lights
anyway because of a freakish burst of Q-radiation from the sky.

And
there is the obvious sort of counterexample to the necessity of ‘no-false-lemmas’
(Saunders and Champawat 1964; Lehrer 1965). Nondefective Chain:
If S has at least one epistemically justifying and non-Gettier-defective
line of justification, then S knows even if S has other justifying
grounds that contain Gettier gaps. For example (Lehrer), suppose S
has overwhelming evidence that Nogot owns a Ford and also overwhelming
evidence that Havit owns one. S then knows that someone in the office
owns a Ford, because S knows that Havit does and performs existential
generalization; it does not matter that one of S’s grounds (S’s
belief that Nogot owns a Ford) is false.(It
does not matter if S has fifty or a thousand other gettiered justifications.)

Further:
Togethersmith
(Rozeboom 1967). On a Sunday afternoon, S (‘Mrs. Jones’) sees the
Togethersmith family car leaving the driveway, and S knows that
every Sunday afternoon all the Togethersmiths go for a drive in the country.
Because S believes that all the Togethersmiths are in the car today
as well, S concludes that Mrs. Togethersmith is not at home, and
S
is right. But it is false that all the Togethersmiths are in the car today;
one of the children is attending a friend’s birthday party.

What
the counterexamples to the sufficiency of ‘no-false-lemmas’ have in common,
of course, is that in them S does not engage in a process of reasoning
that passes through the relevant false step (‘Nogot owns a Ford,’ ‘That
clock is working well,’ etc.). Gilbert Harman (1973) argues that the no-false-lemmas
strategy should be maintained in the face of such examples, indeed should
be aufgehoben into a methodology for investigating the structure of epistemic
justification (indeed, the nature of inference itself). He makes a preliminary
case for his principle P: ‘Reasoning that essentially involves false conclusions,
intermediate or final, cannot give one knowledge’ (47). Then, rather than
entertain putative counterexamples to P, he retains P and looks to see
what epistemological consequences ensue. A first one is that justification
does not proceed by purely probabilistic rules of acceptance, since such
rules do not rely on intermediate conclusions at all (120-4). Further appeals
to P encourage Harman to posit nonconscious mediating inferences where
we might otherwise see none. E.g., he says, a gettiered subject makes tacit
inferences concerning causal connections and other explanatory relations,
and the falsity of those tacit grounds explains, via P, why the subject
fails to know despite being epistemically justified.[12]
Harman uses P in this leveraging way to motivate his general idea that
all inference is or involves ‘inference to the best explanatory statement’
(ch. 8).

Now,
as we saw, our counterexamples to sufficiency are cases in which there
does not seem to be reasoning that passes through a false step. Harman’s
strategy would be to hypothesize that there is such reasoning nonetheless.
I take a different line: What seems more obvious and less potentially controversial
is that in each of the counterexample cases, Stacitly believes
or assumes something false. This is a weaker notion than that of an unconscious
inference that occurrently passes through a false step, for it does not
require any occurrent assumption or inference, even an unconscious one.
For example, in Noninferential Nogot, we can concede to Lehrer that S
does not engage in a reasoning process that passes through ‘Nogot owns
a Ford,’ but clearly S does tacitly assume that Nogot owns a Ford
-- else why on earth would S form the belief that someone in the
office owns one?

Similar
remarks hold for the other counterexamples to sufficiency. Perhaps Testimony
Nogot and Existential Nogot are less obvious than the rest, but each is
fairly obvious: In Testimony Nogot, S falsely assumes that the
person S’s informant is talking about owns a Ford. In Existential Nogot,
S falsely assumes that the protagonist of the evidence owns one.
I propose, then, that (for now) the no-false-lemmas analysis be replaced
by the weaker no-false-assumptions theory.

What
went wrong? That is, if I am right, why was this simple adjustment to Clark’s
proposal not made or even considered? What happened was that theorists
tacitly bypassed the notion of tacit assumption and, in effect, tried to
analyze it in turn. The nearly instantaneous result was the indefeasibility
literature, which began with the useful notion of a defeater, a proposition
which if added to S’s epistemically justifying evidence would render
the expanded evidence set no longer epistemically justifying. That literature
had no success (pace Swain 1974, quoted above); but I say its failures
showed, not that the no-false-assumption analysis of knowing was wrong,
but that the notion of tacit assumption is itself hard to characterize
(in turn) by reference to a defeater. (Indeed, that difficulty was predictable,
because (a) it was almost irresistible to start the further analysis with
a subjunctive of some kind,[13]
and (b) any time any analysis of anything contains a subjunctive, irrelevant
counterexamples will ensue. (b) is worth a paper of its own.) In fact,
the notion of tacit belief is hard to characterize in any terms at all,
never mind subjunctives (Lycan 1986). It was the further ‘defeater’ analyses
of assumption that were wrong, not the no-false-assumption analysis of
knowing.

(Should
it be protested that I should not analyze ‘know’ in terms of a notion whose
own analysis is so vexed, one would have to make the same complaint against
many theorists, in particular against anyone who analyzes anything in terms
of causality.)

But
the counterexamples to necessity are effective, even against the weakened
no-false-assumptions analysis. The mere presence of a false assumption
does not blight knowledge.

Harman
(1973: 47) provides the obvious fix: What is required is only that a justification
must not essentially rest on a false assumption; any false assumption
on which it does rest must be dispensable. As before (the reply is prefigured
in the description of Nondefective Chain itself), if S has even one nongettiered
epistemic justification, it does not matter if S has other justifications
containing false assumptions. So we move from no-false-assumptions to no-essential-false-assumptions.

The
same applies, though not quite so directly, to Togethersmith. S
does assume that all the Togethersmiths are out in the car, and that assumption
is false. But it is not essential to S’s justification. As Rozeboom
himself insists, it is irrelevant that the one child is not in the car.
S
also tacitly assumes that Mrs. Togethersmith is in the car, and has just
as good inductive evidence for that assumption as S has for the
belief that all the Togethersmiths are in it.

But now (the expert
reader will have been shouting for some time) two further putative counterexamples
to sufficiency loom, each very well known: Harman’s (1973) unpossessed-defeater
sort of case, and the Ginet-Goldman barn case (Goldman 1976).

The
assassination:
Jill reads a true newspaper account of a political assassination. The reporter
is known to be entirely trustworthy, and he was himself an eyewitness.
Nor is Jill gettiered. But the victim’s associates, wishing to forestall
panic, have issued a television announcement saying (falsely) that the
assassination attempt failed and that the intended victim is alive. Nearly
everyone has heard the television announcement and believes it. However,
by a fluke, Jill misses it and continues (epistemically justified and nongettiered)
to believe that the victim is dead.

(Harman’s
other two very similar examples are those of Tom Grabit’s mother’s false
but widely accepted testimony, and Donald in Italy and his faked letters
from California.)

Fake
Barn Country:
Henry is looking at a (real) barn, and has impeccable visual and other
evidence that it is a barn. He is not gettiered; his justification is sound
in every way. However, in the neighborhood there are a number of fake,
papiere-mâché barns, any of which would have fooled Henry
into thinking it was a barn.

It
is claimed that Jill and Henry do not know.[14]
What distinguishes these cases from the preceding counterexamples to sufficiency
is that, in them, there are no identifiable false tacit assumptions. In
no reasonable sense is Jill tacitly assuming that no one has issued a television
announcement that the assassination attempt failed; nor is Henry assuming
that there are no papiere-mâché barn replicas in the neighborhood.
(Or if there is such a sense, it is a very loose one and not that same
clear one in which our previous Gettier victims were making their specific
tacit assumptions.) The no-essential-false-assumptions theory does not
rule out these examples.

My
reply is that, on quite independent grounds, I reject the received intuitions;
I do not share them and I also think they are mistaken. I maintain that
Jill and Henry do know, despite the chance elements that peripherally invade
their situations. I have argued that at length in Lycan (1977), and not
on behalf of the present analysis. Readers who do share the unpossessed-defeater
and barn intuitions and who have not read my arguments cannot be expected
to agree, but I stand by the no-essential-false-assumptions analysis. A
bit more argument against Harman and Ginet-Goldman will be enlisted from
Hetherington (1999), in section v
below.

IVFamily resemblances

One
cannot help noticing that the Gettier project is a Socratic search for
a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing. In the 1960s
that would have been even harder not to notice, because under the influence
of Wittgenstein, the Socratic assumption had come under siege: it was nearly
anathema to suppose that an interesting concept could be defined by a crisp
set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Accordingly, it was thought
in some quarters that that is what was wrong with the Gettier project;
the ‘S knows that p’ crowd had not read their Wittgenstein,
and did not understand that ‘know’ is a family-resemblance term (e.g.,
Saunders and Champawat 1964).

Given
the aforementioned nonsuccess of later chisholming projects, the Wittgensteinians’
negative judgment is hard to fault. Perhaps no philosophically interesting
concept admits of explication by strictly necessary and sufficient conditions.
However, that does not explain why the Gettier project was held to be worse
off than the other Socratic quests of the day. Also, the Wittgensteinians’
positive judgment is a substantive commitment and in need of defense: Is
‘know’ a family-resemblance concept? -- i.e., does it in fact have that
structure?

Actually
there are two or more different structures that have been called ‘family-resemblance’
structures. The most distinctive one is that in which a concept ‘X’ is
defined by a paradigm case: There is a list of features, each of which
would be possessed by a paradigm case of an X; if a thing has every feature
on the list, the thing is an X by any standard, a real X, an X and
a half, an X on wheels. To be an X per se, however, is just to have ‘enough’
of the features on the list. (Perhaps the features are weighted in combinations,
but not so thoroughly as to constitute a traditional analysis.) We cannot
be much more precise than just to say ‘enough.’ There will be pretty-much-Xs,
sort-of-Xs, borderline Xs, things that are Xish but not really Xs. Call
this the ‘Paradigm’ structure.

‘Know’
does not have the Paradigm structure.I
suppose there is a paradigm for inferential empirical knowledge. (Though
according to Plato or Descartes, no case of inferential empirical knowledge
would be very close to the paradigm of Knowledge itself.) If S has
overwhelming amounts of evidence for believing that p, has not the
slightest reason to doubt that p, and is not gettiered or beset
by fluke in any way at all, then (barring global skepticism) S surely
knows that p. But suppose S meets the first of those two
conditions but not the third, i.e., S is a classic Gettier victim.
Then (as before) S does not pretty-much-know that p; S
is not a good though imperfect example of a knower. S simply and
flatly does not know. It is not that S fails to have ‘enough’ of
the paradigm features of knowing. It is that S is gettiered and
so disqualified, period.[15]

Wittgenstein’s
own ‘family resemblance’ metaphor does not support the Paradigm interpretation,
even though his central examples, such as ‘game,’ do exhibit the Paradigm
structure.[16]
‘[W]e see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing;
sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail…. I can
think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family
resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family:
build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and
criss-cross in the same way’ (1953: §§66, 67). On this model,
there is no one paradigm, because some of the traits in question may be
mutually incompatible and nothing could have them all. There might be sub-paradigms,
but there need not be those either. As before, though, to fall under the
concept to a degree is to have ‘enough’ of the traits in some acceptable
combination. Call this the ‘Criss-Crossing’ structure.

But
‘know’ does not have the Criss-Crossing structure either, for the same
reason as before. It is not that poor gettiered S fails to have
‘enough’ of the family features; it is that S is disqualified. Also,
there is no very visible ‘family’ composed of people who have one or two
or three of the traits: believing that p, its being true that p,
having evidence that p, not being gettiered. Rather, there is more
of an epistemological hierarchy: believing that p, believing truly
that p, justifiedly and truly believing that p, epistemically-justifiedly
and truly believing that p, epistemically-justifiedly and truly
believing that p and not being gettiered (though one wonders where
on this scale to put epistemically-justifiedly and falsely believing that
p,
and it is not obvious whether justifiably and truly but not epistemically-justifiedly
believing that p but not being gettiered should be ranked higher
or lower than epistemically-justifiedly believing that p and being
gettiered).

Even
if ‘know’ does not have any family-resemblance structure, there is a more
basic complaint that has sometimes been made: that ‘JTB’ is flawed to begin
with, before we get to the question of its sufficiency. In particular,
it is said, knowledge is not a kind of believing, indeed is not a psychological
state at all (Austin 1961; Vendler 1972). Indeed, knowing does not even
entail
believing (Radford 1966).

But
this is no solution to the Problem problem. The traditional claim that
is needed to set up the Problem is only the sufficiency thesis: that if
S
does believe that p truly and with epistemic justification, then
S
knows. The falsity of that thesis is interesting and important and raises
the Gettier question, whether or not knowing entails believing. There are
people who have JTB and accordingly know; but, surprisingly, there are
people who have JTB and do not know. What distinguishes the former from
the latter?

VMore
recent complaints about the Gettier Problem

Insolubility. Craig
(1990) and Zagzebski (1994) suggest an argument for the claim that the
Gettier Problem is insoluble: So long as a particular fourth condition
added to the original three still leaves a logical possibility that a belief
might meet all four conditions and still be false, there will always be
room for further Gettierish flukes and hence there will be counterexamples;
S
could be supergettiered, even if S is not gettiered in the customary
way. But if the fourth condition shuts off that possibility, it will rule
out lots of ordinary instances of knowing and hence be too strong. Thus,
the Gettier Problem is insoluble and for a predictable reason, and that
is what is wrong with it.

Neither
Craig nor Zagzebski actually accepts this argument; indeed Zagzebski (1999)
rejects the second horn of the dilemma, and goes on to offer her own solution
to the Problem. Fogelin (1994) and Merricks (1995) too accept the first
horn but not the second, drawing the moral that whatever ‘epistemic justification’
is, it must guarantee the truth of the belief: either
S has evidence
that entails that
p, or S could not possibly be believing
that p on the basis of that evidence in the circumstances unless
p.[17]

Each
horn is somewhat plausible. If there is no guarantee of truth, then it
does seem that a Gettierish fluke would always be available, though we
have not seen an algorithm for generating one. The second horn is supported
by the same problem that afflicted its particular instance, the Dretske-Armstrong
nomic reliability theory: that perfectly ordinary cases of knowledge do
not seem to meet the guarantee-of-truth requirement.

But,
whatever the merits of the Craig-Zagzebski argument, it would not be a
very interesting solution to the Gettier Problem problem, because if sound
it shows that some version of skepticism is true. It says that to be knowledge,
a belief must meet the guarantee condition, and that hardly any beliefs
meet the guarantee condition.[18]
That is an interesting argument for skepticism, all the more so for being
instigated by the Gettier Problem itself, but for our present purposes
it still proves too much.

Unanalyzability.
There is an ambitious antiGettier claim, seemingly unanswerable if true:
that ‘know’ is unanalyzable. Even if knowledge has necessary conditions
such as truth and belief, of course it does not follow that ‘know’ is analyzable
in terms of those. Williamson (2000) argues at length that ‘know’ should
be taken as primitive. If he is right, then of course any project which
bills itself as ‘analyzing knowledge’ is doomed to failure. And that is
what the Gettier project did bill itself as doing.

However,
even if ‘know’ is unanalyzable and has no set of conceptually necessary
and sufficient conditions, the claim needed to set up the Problem is (again)
only the sufficiency thesis: that epistemically justified true belief suffices
for knowledge. The falsity of that thesis still needs explaining, because,
as before, there are real people who have JTB but still do not know, and
that raises the question of what distinguishes the knower from the Gettier
victim. The Gettier project can rage on unabated.

Rejecting
the Ur-intuition.
Hetherington (1999; 2001) maintains that a Gettier victim does know, though
in a somewhat inferior or ‘less-then-ideal’ way: s/he knows very ‘failably.’

‘Failability’
is a generalization of fallible knowing, and means roughly that
although S knows, there is a single element of luck, in virtue of
which S might not have known or even nearly failed to know. More
precisely: Either there is a possible world in which S believes
that p and is justified by the same good evidence, but it is not
true that p, or there is one in which S correctly believes
that p but is not justified by the same evidence in doing so, or
there is one in which although S would be both correct in believing
that p and justified by the evidence, S does not hold that
belief (1999: 567). (Thus, one has infailable knowledge iff ‘[i]n
each world where one exists and where one has two of the elements of knowing
that p, one also has the third element’: 568.) Note that failability
is a matter of degree; some knowledge will admit more and/or closer
epistemic-failure worlds than does other knowledge.

Having
identified fallible knowing with the first of the three foregoing
disjuncts, Hetherington argues that it is arbitrary to single out that
disjunct in preference to the other two, and so his generalization from
fallibility to failability is natural and nontendentious. There is at least
a presumption, then, that knowledge can be failable in either of the other
two ways as well.

Fallible
knowing is of course presupposed by the Gettier
Problem; hence so is failable knowing. Now Hetherington suggests that a
Gettier case is one in which, although S does know, S knows
only
very failably; ‘the epistemic subject almost fails to have
his well-justified true belief’ (573). A classic Gettier example falls
under the first disjunct; there are scads of very nearby worlds in which
S
believes (on the very same very strong evidence grounded in Mr. Nogot)
that someone
in the office owns a Ford, but in which neither Havit nor anyone else owns
one. A Harman unpossessed-defeater
case falls under the third disjunct, for there are lots of nearby worlds
in which the assassination does occur and Jill has her same evidence for
it, but in which (because she did there hear the government denials) she
has abandoned her belief.

Obviously,
if the Gettier victim knows, her/his knowledge is not just failable but
very failable. But why should we forsake all received judgment and concede
that s/he does know? Rather than giving a positive reason, Hetherington
spends the rest of his article suggesting diagnoses of our failure to fall
in with his view. The mainstream epistemologist has made a tacit fallacious
inference: from the fact that ‘there must be a difference in the quality
of the instances of knowing in, respectively, a normal situation where
there is failable knowledge that p, and a Gettier situation where
there is failable knowledge that p’ (575); or from ‘how easy it
is to imagine changes to the circumstances within a Gettier case, changes
which would have led to the case’s epistemic subject not having the well-justified
true belief he actually has’ (579); or from the subject’s true belief owing
anything at all to luck (581); or from the subject’s epistemically justified
belief being not robust, a ‘near thing’ (581-2); or from the fact that
‘the more failable…[a piece of knowledge] is, the less confident we might
be that it is knowledge’ (585); or, when we are already sniffing around
knowledge’s ‘lower boundary,’ from the fact that knowledge has a lower
boundary (586).

I
suspect that few of my fellow mainstreamers will recognize themselves in
these diagnoses, and even fewer will be persuaded to adopt Hetherington’s
maverick verdict on Gettier cases generally. But, although my most diligent
introspection reveals none of the fallacious inferences on my own part
either, I am more sympathetic to Hetherington’s view than most will be.
He very usefully distinguishes between ‘helpful’ Gettier cases and ‘dangerous’
ones: A helpful case is one in which the Gettierish ‘strange occurrence’
or fluke saves JTB itself, as when Havit owns a Ford even though Nogot
does not. A dangerous case is one in which the ‘strange occurrence’ prevents
knowledge despite existing normal JTB, as in Harman’s unpossessed-defeater
examples and the Ginet-Goldman barn case.

As
I declared in section iii,
I reject the majority view that the victims in unpossessed-defeater cases
and the barn case lack knowledge. And now Hetherington has shown that those
examples have something distinctive in common, viz., being ‘dangerous’
as opposed to ‘helpful.’[19]
Moreover, I think his interpretation of them is pretty much right: that
although their protagonists’ knowledge is failable and some luck is involved
in a peripheral way, it is knowledge nonetheless. True, Jill and Henry
nearly failed to know; it does not follow that they fail to know. With
Hetherington, I maintain that they do know.

(But
in my view the same cannot be said about the classic, ‘helpful’ cases.
I could not possibly jolly myself into agreeing that S knows that
someone in the office owns a Ford, when S’s only reason for believing
that is that S thinks Nogot owns one. I find it hard to imagine
that anyone would credit S with knowing that there is a sheep in
Chisholm’s field when the sheep that quite coincidentally makes S’s
belief true is off in a distant corner of the field, hidden from view by
hedges. (However, this may only show the poverty of my imaginative powers;
see below.))

Weatherson
(2003) also urges, though on grounds very different from Hetherington’s,
that gettiered people do know. His idea is a very general one about philosophers’
‘intuitions’: that intuitions about cases should be trumped, as they are
often considered overruled in ethical theory, by a good (otherwise) coherent
and systematic theory that says otherwise. Though an analysis must respect
a majority of intuitions, it may disregard one when that one forces us
into ‘unnatural’ complications and draws the analysandum away from comparatively
natural properties in the world. (No one who has read the indefeasibility
analysis quoted in section i
above could deny that the Gettier intuition has been known to do such forcing
and drawing.)

Weatherson’s
paper is complex and rich, and I cannot do it justice here. I accept his
‘main claim … that even once we have accepted that the JTB theory seems
to say the wrong thing about Gettier cases, we should still keep an open
mind to the question of whether it is true’ (10).[20]
I shall merely state four reasons why, though I agree that the seeming
does not entail the falsity of ‘JTB,’ I continue to join in the majority
view.

First,
though Swain’s indefeasibility analysis is hideously ‘unnatural,’ of course
I chose it as an extreme case. Not every proffered analysis is so complex
or so disjunctive. Just to take a random example, my own no-essential-false-assumptions
analysis is not so unnatural. It is rather neat, I think.

Second,
I do not believe that JTB is a conspicuously more natural kind than
nongettiered JTB. If anything, I would say a Gettier victim has more in
common with a not fully justified believer than with a knower.[21]
(Also, those of us who think that ‘know’ inherits normativity from its
relation to justification would not expect knowledge to be a particularly
natural kind.)

Third,
I believe intuitions have enough authority that if we want to reject one,
we ought to explain it away. I think Weatherson agrees, and of course he
is well aware that this happens often in philosophy. Why, then, is there
so widespread instant agreement that Gettier victims do not know? As noted
above, Hetherington put in some work on this, however plausible or implausible
we think his explanations are; but unless I have missed it, Weatherson
does not offer anything comparable.

Finally,
Weatherson’s argument does not single out the Gettier Problem, even though
the Problem is his stalking horse. Similar points could be made about all
the other analytic projects mentioned in section I.
So Weatherson has not solved the Problem problem, so far as that requires
exhibiting some special defect in the Gettier Problem that distinguishes
it from analytic projects generally.

Actual
diversity of intuitions.
Weinberg, Stich and Nichols (2001) present data they have collected, according
to which the intuitions of subjects from different ethnic groups vary statistically.
In particular, 60% of subjects originally from the Indian subcontinent,
presented with a Gettier example, judged that its protagonist does ‘really
know’ as opposed to ‘only believe.’ For that matter, nearly 25% of the
European-descended American subjects made the same antiGettier judgment.
This raises two issues: First, is there cultural relativity in the concept
of knowing? Second, even within the class of, say, educated European-descended
Americans, is the Gettier intuition reliable? If the answer to either question,
especially the second, is ‘no,’ then the Gettier project is parochial at
best, and is not an augustly Socratic inquiry into the nature of Knowledge
Itself.

I
have several doubts about the experimental procedures described by the
authors, and I would not take their results at face value. But they do
not claim too much for them. And to make things interesting, let us ignore
such doubts, and suppose that the survey results are impeccably produced
and robustly replicated: 60% of an Asian ethnic group and 25% of European-descended
American undergraduates firmly reject Gettier and insist, clearheadedly
and understanding the terms and the issue, that a Gettier ‘victim’ does
know.

In
that eventuality, I submit, we have a conceptual difference. In the speech
of the 60% and the 25%, ‘know’ really does mean justified true belief,
period. We would have to regard that speech as a dialect that differs from
our own. It would be interesting to go on to ask those subjects whether
they see any important difference between the two kinds of ‘knowers,’ ordinary
ones and Gettier victims. Perhaps they would stigmatize the Gettier victims
in some way for which there is no simple convenient expression. Or, less
likely, they would see no important difference, and simply have no stronger
conception of successful cognition.

This
sort of dialect difference is less rare than one might think. It can lurk
unsuspected for decades or whole lifetimes, because it is slight and the
sort of hypothetical case that would bring it out is unusual. Here is an
example from my own experience. Sartre bemoans the fact that we have no
simple expression for the following situation:

A
believes that not-p, but for selfish reasons wants B to believe
that p. In a persuasive manner, A tells B that p:
‘p, B; trust me, old friend, would I ever lie to you?’ Now
in fact, A is mistaken, and it is true that p. A has
tried to lie to B, and A’s character is that of a liar. But
what A said was true, so it cannot be called a lie.

On
many occasions I have mentioned this in my undergraduate classes, and every
time, about 40% of the students balk at Sartre’s judgment, and say they
have no difficulty in calling A a liar. When I protest that a lie
cannot be true, they say, ‘Sure it can’; all that matters to them is the
intent to deceive. On the basis of induction, I predict that 40% of my
readers will likewise have rejected Sartre’s complaint.

There
is no substantive issue here. Neither I nor the 40% are right to the exclusion
of the other. It is simply a dialect difference -- one that I did not discover
until I was in my 40s.[22]

If
another culture has a word that we have been translating as ‘know’ but
turns out not to share the Gettier intuition, then their word should not
strictly be translated as ‘know’ (though there may be no convenient competing
expression of English). And if it is really true that 25% of ordinary English
speakers simply do not share the intuition, there is a dialect difference.

Weinberg,
Stich and Nichols may urge that such an outcome would diminish the importance
of the Gettier project. Gettier practitioners would then be pursuing only
the minutiae of a concept possessed by some speakers of English. I reply:
So be it. The concept has proved to be an important one among English-speaking
philosophers, regardless of how more widespread it may be. If another culture
or another dialect group simply does not have that concept, then of course
the Gettier Problem does not arise for them.

Now,
I take very seriously the cynical suggestion that the Gettier concept is
a philosophers’ artifact and does not represent anything possessed by ordinary
people. No professional philosopher is qualified to make any pronouncement
about the ordinary concept of anything -- period -- though few of us can
resist making such pronouncements. I believe that some philosophically
important and contentious concepts are such artifacts. My leading example
would be Putnam’s (1975) externalist natural-kind concepts. When I teach
‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ to novices, they invariably resist. At best
I can get them to concede that there is a sense in which XYZ on
Twin Earth is not water.[23]
But there is a sharp contrast here: I have never had the slightest trouble
convincing novices by Gettier example that ‘JTB’ is insufficient for knowing.
And I do not think that is because of my being the instructor or my natural
authority, let alone force of personality or great professional stature.

VIPrognosis?

Fodor
et al. (1980) have argued convincingly that no interesting concept can
be analyzed in the traditional Socratic way, by a nice set of individually
necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. At least on inductive grounds,
we should not expect a solution to the Gettier Problem having that form.
But it remains to be shown what we should expect, instead.

And
as I have argued, none of the going solutions to the Problem problem succeeds.
So
far as has been shown, there is nothing particularly wrong with the
Gettier Problem, and people who work on it do not (for that reason) deserve
the sneers that are sometimes sent their way.

I
am happy with my simple no-essential-false-assumptions analysis. What about
you?[24]

[1]Armstrong
(1973: 152-53) is an example. He adds, ‘Gettier’s paper has been commented
upon, with a view to excluding his counter-example by judiciously chosen
extra conditions, in a truly alarming and ever-increasing series of papers.’

[2]It
should be noted that Professor Gettier himself has taken no interest in
the literature that bears his name. At least, he says he never has, and
I have no reason to doubt his word.

[3]Swain
(1974: 16, 22, 25),an indefeasibility theory. And here is a comparably
advanced version of the causal theory:

S
has nonbasic knowledge that p iff (i) p is true; (ii)
S
believes that p; (iii) S’s justification renders p
evident for S;…(iv*) [w]here ‘e’ designates the portion of
S’s
total evidence E that is immediately relevant to the justification
of p, either (A) there is a nondefective causal chain
from P to BSe; or (B) there is some event or state of affairs
Q
such that (i) there is a nondefective causal chain from
Q
to BSe; and (ii) there is a nondefective causal chain from
Q to P; or (C) there is some event or state of affairs H
such that (i) there is a nondefective causal chain from H
to BSe; and (ii) H is a nondefective pseudo-overdeterminant
of P.[Where a causal chain
X ? Y is ‘defective’ with respect to S’s justification for
p based on evidence e iff: Either (I) (a) there is some event
or state of affairs U in X ? Y such that S would be
justified in believing that U did not occur and (b) it is essential
to S’s justifiably believing that p on the basis of the evidence
e
that S would be justified in believing that U did not occur;
or (II) there is some significant alternative C* to X ? Y
with respect to S justifiably believing that p on the basis
of e. [Where C* is a ‘significant alternative’ to X ?
Y with respect to S justifiably believing that p on the
basis of e if (a) it is objectively likely that C* should
have occurred rather than X ? Y ; and (b) if C* had occurred
instead of X ? Y, then there would have been an event or state of
affairs U in C* such that S would not be justified
in believing that p if S were justified in believing that
U
occurred.]

(Swain
1972: 292;1978: 110-11,
115-16). Notice that, running out of energy, I have spared us the unpacking
(118) of ‘defectiveness’ for ‘pseudo-overdeterminants,’ employed in (iv*)(C)(ii).

[4]The
most complex competitor I can recall is Stephen Schiffer’s (1972: 75-6)
analysis of speaker-meaning:

S
meant that p by uttering x iff S uttered x
intending thereby to realize a certain state of affairs E which
is (intended by S to be) such that the obtainment of E is
sufficient to secure that

(1a)
if anyone who has a certain property F knows that E obtains,
then that person will know that S knows that E obtains;

(1b)
if anyone who is F knows that E obtains, then that person
will know that S knows that (1a); and so on;

(2a)
if anyone who is F knows that E obtains, then that person
will know (or believe) -- and know that
S knows (or believes) --
that E is conclusive (very good or good) evidence that S
uttered x with the primary intention

(1’)
that there be some ? such that S’s utterance of x
causes in anyone who is F the activated belief that p/ ?(t);

and
intending

(2’)
satisfaction of (1’) to be achieved, at least in part, by virtue of that
person’s [i.e., the person(s) satisfying (1’)] belief that x is
related in a certain way R to the belief that p;

(3’)
to realize E;

(2b)
if anyone who is F knows that E obtains, then that person
will know that S knows that (2a); and so on.

It
is interesting that speaker-meaning is here analyzed in terms of knowing.

[5]Particularly
Quine (1963; 1966). Lycan (1994a: chs. 11, 12) defends a strong version
of the skeptical doctrine, though not quite so strong a one as Quine’s
own.

[6]I
am the grateful owner of a wristwatch that once, to his delight, actually
gettiered Marshall Swain. Swain very graciously made me a present of the
watch upon the occasion of my leaving the OhioStateUniversity
in 1982.

[7]A
number of authors have argued that there is a sense of ‘know’ in
which TB suffices for knowing (Hintikka 1962:
18-19; Powers
1978; Goldman 1999:
23-5; Hetherington 2001).
But Sartwell’s radical claim is that there is no other, more demanding
sense. (Lycan 1994b argues directly against Sartwell.)

[11]Actually
in this example, Lehrer upgrades the vehicle to a Ferrari.

[12]In
this way he neatly accounts for Goldman’s (1967) otherwise incongruous
need to require that S ‘reconstruct’ the main links in the relevant
causal chain from fact to belief.

[13]Lehrer’s
(1965) (iv c) is a leading example: ‘If S is completely justified
in believing any false statement p which entails (but is not entailed
by)
h, then S would be completely justified in believing
h
even if S were to suppose that p is false’ (174). This was
readily counterexampled by Harman (1966) and Shope (1978). Rozeboom’s (1967)
principle (A) is probably closest to my no-false-assumptions formula, though
it still injects a quasi-subjunctive element: ‘If person X believes
p--justifiably--only
because he believes q, while he justifiably believes q on
the basis of evidence e, then
q as well as p must
be the case if X’s belief in p is to qualify as ‘knowledge’’
(281-82).

[15]A
similar point is made by Weatherson (2003: 19).But
again pace Hetherington (2001).

[16]This
point was called to my attention by Dorit Bar-On, who offered the resemblances
between members of her own extended family as an example. There may be
yet other structures that come under the heading of ‘family resemblance.’
E.g., Craig (1990) speaks of a ‘prototypical case’ (15), and seems to mean
by that something about statistical frequency.

[17]I
believe Almeder (1974) was the first to take this line, though Rozeboom
(1967) says something similar.

[18]
Adler (1981) argues for skepticism in this way, and also in effect defends
the first horn of the dilemma.

[19]A
similar distinction was made by Fogelin (1994). Notice, incidentally, that
the ‘dangerous’ cases are not really Gettier cases at all, except in the
generic sense of being (alleged) counterexamples to ‘JTB,’ precisely because
they do not have the characteristic false-assumption structure; it would
be inaccurate to say that either Jill or Henry had been gettiered. (Obviously
I do not mean that remark as an argument either for my claim that their
protagonists know or for my proposed analysis.)

[20]After
all, I myself reject the widely embraced Harman and Ginet-Goldman examples.
But notice that this is different: I reject those intuitions because I
do not share them in the first
place. Weatherson is urging that even when we firmly share the original
Gettier intuition,
we should set it aside and not allow it to guide our belief.

[21]Weatherson
(27-8) attributes a similar point to Peter Klein in conversation.

[22]In
fact, I suspect that such hidden dialect differences occur not infrequently
in philosophy,
though this is not the time or place to argue that. For a hypothesis to
this effect within epistemology, and a nice theoretical framework that
helps to explain
the phenomenon, see Battaly (2001).

[23]Indeed,
there was a good deal of resistance to Putnam’s own original presentations
in the mid-1970s. But, as Rob Cummins would say, the people who disputed
Putnam’s ‘intuition’ were not invited to the next conference. Of course,
I am inclined to think that Harman’s unpossessed-defeater examples and
(especially) the Ginet-Goldman barn case are artifacts of this sort. For
the record, I do not share the lottery intuition either; I believe that
if the chances are 10,000,000 to 1 against, you do know you will not win,
and so much the worse for various forms of ‘rule-out’ epistemology.

[24]Many
thanks to Ram Neta for extensive and very helpful discussion. I am
grateful also to Kati Farkas for correcting a serious error.